Group items tagged

"Knewton today announced the launch of Alta, the company's fully integrated adaptive learning courseware for higher education. Available at $44 per course for two years of access, Alta delivers an affordable and impactful teaching and learning experience that combines Knewton's adaptive learning technology with high-quality openly available content."

"The effective implementation and use of adaptive learning systems requires a broad, more inclusive conversation among institutions, vendors, and other stakeholders to realize the benefits of next-generation personalized learning."

"One of the obstacles to bringing "adaptive learning" to college classrooms is that professors, administrators, and even those who make adaptive-learning systems don't always agree on what that buzzword means."

""we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes." (p. 3) Using a set of effective tutor characteristics identified by Lepper and Wolverton (a reference to their research is in the article), Wood and Tanner explore how these seven characteristics can be adapted and used in large lecture courses (and what they propose isn't applicable just in biology courses). Here are some of the suggestions offered for each tutor characteristic."

"This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the PressBooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book are faculty and post-secondary instructors in Saskatchewan, Canada who are developing, adapting or adopting open textbooks at the University of Saskatchewan. However, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives."

"Knewton's pivot in 2018 toward tools that combine adaptive-learning technology with open educational resources was a big part of the attraction for Wiley. With its Alta digital-courseware platform, Knewton is primarily an OER company now, Wiley's president and chief executive, Brian Napack, told The Chronicle. The product costs students about $40 per course. Wiley wants to "double down" on low-cost options, Napack said. "We're doing this because we think the future needs to look different than the past.""

This year's study, which was released last month, reflects well on instructors. Faculty members, contra their reputation for being change-averse, appear to be adapting well to the expectations of technology-thirsty students, according to the authors. "More students than ever gave positive marks for their instructors' use of technology," they wrote.

"To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. Teachers need to update their own skills through regular training. The strategy also calls on Member States to strengthen links between education and employers, to bring enterprise into the classroom and to give young people a taste of employment through increased work-based learning. EU Education Ministers are also encouraged to step-up their cooperation on work-based learning at national and European level."

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

"Digital literacies have a life-wide impact which is not limited to either the academic or the employment domain. Developing critical and evaluation skills results in sought-after and adaptable employees. Yet digital literacy is not simply about learning from content online this represents a deficit model of education (frequently practiced) rather than skills development."

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lecturers in higher education often consider the incorporation of web technologies into their teaching practice. Partially structured and populated course site templates could aid them in getting started with creating and deploying webbased materials and activities to enrich the teaching and learning experience. Discussions among instructional technology support staff and lecturers reveal a paucity of robust specifications for possible course site features that could comprise a template. An attempted mapping from the teaching task as understood by the instructor to the envisaged course website properties proves elusive. We conclude that the idea of an initial state for a course site, embodied in a template, remains useful and should be developed not according to a formula but with careful attention to the context and existing pedagogical practice. Any course template provided for the use of lecturers should be enhanced with supporting instructions and examples of how it may be adapted for their particular purposes.

"At their best, digital textbooks offer a learning experience that boosts engagement, adapts to student learning, tracks performance and ensures up-to-date content - all while potentially saving costs in the longterm. According to a report from the Digital Textbook Collaborative, which was convened by the FCC and the US Department of Education, the cost of implementing the shift to digital varies from $250 to $1,000 per student per year, but the cost savings from increased teacher attendance, reduced paper costs, online assessments and other factors are estimated to be $600 per student per year. However, some say estimates on cost savings assume tablet prices that are less than actual costs and, without funding support, the upfront costs are difficult for many school districts to manage."

"the same student being tracked and evaluated while using an adaptive courseware product has a digital footprint and legacy that extends well beyond the parameters of a singularly focused electronic learning environment."

"OCW Educator helps teachers search the vast library of OCW resources to find instructional approaches and teaching materials. Explore This Course at MIT pages to discover how MIT instructors teach their courses, and freely select and adapt their explanations, examples, and simulations to help concepts come to life in your own classroom."

"The Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators contains the process and methods of design, adapted specifically for the context of education."

Overwhelmingly, students are open to adopting digital alternatives to traditional resources because they provide value on price, content, and portability. These are all areas where traditional textbook publishers have stopped innovating and fallen flat. Our findings suggest that students have already adapted to cost and access barriers with behaviors not supported by the traditional textbook market. We are at a new precipice in education, one where digital innovation will define the way our students work, learn, and interact - all in a post-textbook world.

After working with a tool for a while, you forget all the familiarity you've built up, all the muscle memory, all the ways that the tool is useful to you. Instead, all you see are the annoyances. But on the other hand, all you see about a new tool are the shiny new features, and you can't see all the hours and days you'll spend learning and adapting, fiddling and breaking the new tool.

"There's little reason for typesetting to be such an expensive bottleneck in both time and money when we have better solutions in place. Academia will have to adopt new methods of producing text-based content. This was true when scholars moved from typewriters to word processors like Microsoft Word. Word enabled new capabilities like saving documents and editing them over time, rich text formatting, and the like. Unfortunately, Word arrived in a world before the internet and has never been adapted to work with the internet. As a result, it takes months to get an article into a format that can communicate with the web. Keep in mind that once we have the text in a web-communicable form the innovative things we can do with it are endless in terms of presentation, analytics, and more. We can't reverse that scholarship is moving to the web so we might as well learn how to speak with the web, today."